We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.